What are the different qualities of Kamala Das's Poetry.

What are the different qualities of Kamala Das’s Poetry.

Discuss Kamala Das as a poet.

Assess the poetic achievement of Kamala Das, giving illustrations from the poems you have read.

Ans.

Kamala Das is the most distinguished of all the Indo-Anglian poets, and she has certainly made a name for herself by the virtue of her craftmanship as much as by the novelty or the innovative quality, of her treatment of her themes. Hers is the poetry of introspection and self analysis, and in this respect she equals poets like Nissim Ezekiel while she surpasses them in her frankness and candour in expressing the thoughts, ideas, longings, yearnings and disappointments which laying the depths of her heart but which she has been most effectively able to bring to the surface. Her unusual frankness in dealing with the subject of sex and her sensitive awareness of her outward surroundings, their ugliness, their horror constitute the strength of her poetry which shows her complete and absolute attention to those surroundings as well as to the social context in which she has always lived.

Kamala Das has been described as a confessional poet on the ground that she has revealed what strikes the readers as the secrets of her life and as her secret thoughts and feelings. She believes in ‘strip teasing’ her mind and ‘excluding autobiography’. She dissects her mind and her psyche, freely dwelling upon matters which are strictly personal and private. her confessional mode of writing poetry is probably derived from the American poet. Robert Lowell, Furthermore, she is essentially a poet of sexual relationships, of marriage, sex, and lust. In all her three collections of poems “Summer in Calcutta”, :The descendants’ and ‘The Old Playhouse and Other poems” she concentrates on the themes of love, the failure of love or the absence of love and frustration experienced by her in conjugal life.

Kamala Das deals with these themes in a most uninhibited manner. She deals with the subject of her marriage, the failure of her marriage, and her extramarital sexual relationships with a candour which is shocking to an orthodox Indian. In the poem entitled ‘The Old Playhouse’. she censures her husband with a brutal frankness. Pointing, an accusing finger at him, she says that he had trained her to carry out her duties as his wife in a subservient manner so that, cowering beneath his monstrous ego, she has become a dwarf. losing all her will-power and her capacity for independent, thinking. In this poem she also describes his crude manner of making love to her, his only object being to satisfy his lust and give nothing to her in terms of love or affection.

What is distinctive about Kamala Das’s poetry of marriage and sex is the boldness and the daring which she exhibits in her treatment of these themes. She even admits without the least hesitation or reluctance the many sexual relationships into which she entered with other men because of her dissatisfaction with her husband and the sordid kind of conjugal life that she had to lead. And she does so in poem after poem.

This uninhibited treatment of sexual love is the most striking feature of her poetry. But this perfect frankness in speaking about sex and using such expressions as the. “musk of sweat between the breasts”, “the warm shock of menstrual blood”, and “pubis” is not just a cheap exercise or a wanton display of thighs and sighs, nor merely a case of “from bed to verse’. Kamala Das’s persona is no nymphomaniac. The persona who may he Kamala Das herself is simply every woman who seeks love, she is “the beloved and the betrayed.” expressing her “endless female hungers”, and “the muted whisper at the core of womanhood”. Kamala Das may flaunt a grand flamboyant lust, “but in her heart of hearts she remains the eternal Eve proudly celebrating her essential femininity. The persona’s experience evidently derives from a traumatic frustration in love and marriage, compelling her to “run from one gossamer love to another”, The result is confessional poetry obsessively treating of love, sex and marriage.

Thus Kamala Das is not to be, distinguished from other Indo-Anglian women poets merely by the choice of her themes, and by her frank treatment of those themes. 11cr poetry exists the several faces of Eve-woman as sweetheart, as flirt, as wife, as woman of the world, as mother, as middle aged matron and above all, woman as an-untiring seeker of the nature of the psychological processes behind both femininity and masculinity. Love too in her poetry appears in several roles such as a “skin communicated thing”, an overpowering force, an escape, a longing, and a hunger resulting in safety Her generally sex-dominated poetry has unfortunately pushed into the background her few but sensitive poems which evoke childhood memories of her ancestral home in Kerala. At the same time her poetry may be regarded as the poetry of protests Her protest is directed against the injustices and the persecution to which women in India have always been subjected. in a poem entitled ‘Conflagration’, she scolds the Indian women for thinking that their only. function is to. lie beneath a man in order to satisfy his lust. Here she tells the woman that the world extends a lot beyond he six foot frame of a husband. Thus her poetry serves a social purpose and a reformative function too.

Kamala’s sense of alienation finds, a most striking expression in the poem entitled An Introduction. In this poem she first refers, in a sarcastic and intensely censorious manner, to those critics, friends and visiting cousins who urged her not to write poetry in the English language because this language was not her mother tongue. Kamala Das’s reply to this advice is that she would write in any language she likes, which ever language she uses, would become hers, with all its distortions and its queernesses. This ‘Sense of alienation from her friends and cousins voices her protest against people who think that Indians should not write poetry in the English ‘language.

In the choice of words, Kamala Das exercise a special care, and her words and phrases, clauses, and sentences, show her rare understanding of meaning, the appropriateness and the subtleties of words. At the same time her poetry reveals a mastery of and a control over rhythm. Her best poems а display a strong feeling of rhythm. She often employs words in such a way as to express the vehemence of her emotion and the intensity of her resentment. Here are a couple of examples of the forceful use of words and phrases-

Cowering

Beneath your monstrous ego I ate a magic loaf and

Became a dwarf. (The Old Playhouse)

The heart

An empty cistern, waiting

Through long hours, fills itself

With coiling snakes of silence. (The Freaks)

Many of Kamala Das’s love-poems have a Browning’s like dramatic quality. Like Browning’s women, her persona too sees herself in different situations against a concrete background, reacting to incidents in the development of the soul. The intensity of her utterance sometimes results in a lack of verbal discipline and her constant harping upon sex cannot escape the law of diminishing aesthetic returns. She has her moments of romantic claptrap and sentimentality also (for instance, in such lines as “O Krishna, I am melting. melting, melting”). But the total impression which Kamala Das’s poetry produces is one of a bold, ruthless honesty fearing passionately the conventional attitudes to reveal the quintessential woman within.

Thus, it can be said that Kamala Das is a revolutionary poet who started the trend towards frankness and candour in the treatment of a subject which was almost a taboo. She was thus a trend-setter, and the trend started by her has now become almost a vogue.